Thursday, December 20, 2012

Lady in the Lake - 1947

“Lady in the Lake” (1947) uses playful images of Christmas
in that clever brand of sarcasm used by only the best private eyes.And Robert Montgomery.

This is our second installment of A Very Gumshoe Christmas,
and we take up where “Alias Boston Blackie” on Monday left off…from B-movie to
classic noir.The loner detective grows
up, and grows cynical.Christmas throws
us off the trail from the start, but never Philip Marlowe.

There will be no plot spoilers, just a few impressions of an
unusual and daring film.

“Lady in the Lake” is famous foremost for its unique
first-person camera view, and for discussions back and forth by fans for
decades on how effective it is or isn’t.Obviously, the camera has some limitations—for one, it does not
accurately imitate the peripheral vision of the human eye.Some scenes may seem slow or unintentionally
comical to the modern viewer as the actors play directly to the camera.But this wild experimentation is exactly what
deserves our respect in an industry where “copycat” is the usual art form and
risks are rare.

Robert Montgomery, who we last saw here in “Night Must Fall”(1937) makes his official directorial debut with this movie, and also
stars.However, as he is playing the
lead, detective Philip Marlowe, we see all the action from his viewpoint, but
only see him a few times in the course of the film when he happens to look in a
mirror.

On another occasion, his shadow on a wall as he is talking
with Audrey Totter is his stand-in.

This may make the film frustrating for Robert Montgomery
fans who want to see him (the film was not a box office hit in part for this
reason), but true fans of Mr. Montgomery should appreciate his ingenuity in
crafting this film.

Audrey Totter, who we last saw here in “Tension” (1949), plays a
complex role of a magazine editor who hires Montgomery to find the missing wife
of her publisher boss, played by Leon Ames. Miss Totter should have gotten some kind of
prize for playing probably 99 percent of her work in this movie directly to the
camera.That is a workout, and she is a
lot of fun to watch; at turns scowling, flirting, pleading, and seducing. (Today is Miss Totter's 94th or 95th birthday - not sure of the year of birth. According to IMDb website she is residing at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in California. A very happy birthday to a terrific and fondly remembered actress.)

Lloyd Nolan is excellent as a tough cop.He’s great in whatever he does,
and I actually would have loved to have seen him take the lead and play Marlowe
in this movie. His down-and-dirty growl of a
voice.

Tom Tully is the world-weary police chief.Jayne Meadows is a standout as a mercurial,
almost manic, woman who knows a lot more than she lets on.

Dick Simmons is a smooth and deceptively
friendly gigolo. You can tell he's a gigolo by the striped jersey.

There are some lines tossed around that would make for a great
movie no matter how it was filmed.Audrey Totter, whose magazines are of the sensationalist pulp variety,
complains to an underling that a new magazine cover design needs more gore. "Not enough gore."

Montgomery, recovering from being slugged by the Southern “gentleman”
Dick Simmons remarks, “At least he had the decency to hit me above the
Mason-Dixon line.”

And Lloyd Nolan’s remark, “How does it feel dying in the
middle of someone else’s dirty love affair?” I love that line.

Despite the restriction of actors playing directly to the
camera, there are flashes of remarkable electricity to their performances,
moments akin to a stage actor’s reactions.Some of their responses and facial actions look almost
improvisational.

Because we are the camera’s eye, we see everything Montgomery
sees.Some of this gimmick is playful and
funny, as when Montgomery’s leering glance follows Totter’s curvaceous
secretary around the room, and with a sharp, somewhat jealous interjection by
Totter, our attention is swiftly brought back to the mollified Miss Totter behind her desk.

Sometimes the gimmick is quite eerie, as when we discover
bullet holes in a glass shower door, we approach and open the door, and our gaze
rests upon bullet-gouged porcelain tiles in the shower stall, falling down upon
the naked corpse crumpled on the floor.

Or when Montgomery, injured after a car wreck, crawls (and
so do we), hand over hand, across a road to a phone booth that seems a mile
away.

We are stared at.We
are flirted with.We are punched in the
face. We kiss Audrey Totter. She serves
us a highball. We notice a hundred different clues, and sometimes, as when
Montgomery lifts a phone receiver to his mouth and talks, we look at nothing,
like at the corner of a table, just as we would absently look at nothing while
we are concentrating on a voice in our ear.

All this would be enough to make a fun and very different
movie, but set during Christmastime, the director uses images of Christmas in a
very cavalier and smart aleck way.

We begin with the opening credits, which are title cards
designed to look like Christmas cards.Images of Wise Men, and holly, Santa, poinsettia, all the iconic
graphics and over them, a medley of Christmas carols in uplifting choral
arrangements that may make us think we are about to watch a heartwarming tale
of love and repentance.In a way, maybe,
but it’s a crooked road to repentance.

As the credits finish and the Christmas carols end, the last
title card reveals a handgun.We were
had.Trust nobody.

We start three days before Christmas.Robert Montgomery takes on a missing person
job, that soon turns into a murder investigation.All along the journey, though he is a man
without family and evidently has no Christmas plans, the yuletide follows close
on his heels, a shadow of irony.

We knock on doors and are faced with Christmas wreaths.He remarks to the gigolo Simmons, “I like
your tan.It’s very Christmassy.”

We intrude upon an office Christmas party, where a reserved
and gentlemanly Leon Ames hands out gifts to his employees.

In a scene with Audrey Totter, Montgomery confronts her with
conflicting evidence.He demands she own
up to secrets, and when he has found a gun that was used to murder, he hands it
to her gift-wrapped as a gruesome present.She plays the scene framed close to a desktop Christmas tree.Christmas stays in the tense scene like a
mocking clown.

Leon Ames takes him aside and want to hire him, too.He nervously picks at the tinsel on the
branch of a Christmas tree that juts out from the side of the frame.Christmas is pushy, demands attention and will not be
left out.

When we are arrested and interrogated by Tom
Tully, Mr. Tully is interrupted by a phone call from home.It is his little daughter, who wants Daddy to
come home and help her put up her stocking.With quick, wary glances to us, he indulgently listens to his daughter’s
prattle, even helping her through her recitation of “T’was the Night Before
Christmas.”It is offbeat, funny, and
very surreal.

I like the scene where, trying to escape Lloyd Nolan
hovering in the police station hall, we duck into the press room and find a “journalist”
lying on the table, speaking “pillow talk” into the phone to his lady friend, a
Racing Form by his head.

After a beating, a car wreck, and a belly full of people
lying to him, Montgomery is saved by Audrey Totter, who responds
to his emergency call and brings him, unconscious, to her apartment. She gives him a Christmas present: a robe she had bought for another man. Like earlier false clues that went nowhere,
even the gift to him is not a gift to him.Marlowe’s world is made up of lies.

On Christmas Day, they listen to “A Christmas Carol” on the
radio, which was an annual event back in the day, though it doesn’t sound like
Lionel Barrymore, and we blow streams of cigarette smoke as we regard Audrey
Totter lying contentedly on the living room couch, her eyes drinking us in,
across from where we are sitting.

When
the program ends, she snaps off the radio and resumes, as if picking up in
mid-sentence, the tale of her hardscrabble life.Only Scrooge could have interrupted her. She asks Montgomery what he did last Christmas Eve. He spent it in a bar. She spent it in a nightclub. This Christmas is an improvement, or should be if they weren't so depressed. Christmas offers redemption, but you have to trust it. These two lonely people have some serious trust issues.

I was a bit surprised at the can of pork and beans on the kitchen
counter.I would have thought Audrey
Totter was decidedly not a pork and beans person.

Montgomery has one task left, and, spying his quarry window-shopping
at a Christmas-decorated window, we have a final, very dramatic scene leading
to the conclusion of the case.The movie,
like detective Philip Marlowe, is flawed, but has guts.Teasing us with Christmas images in an
otherwise grim movie is an irresistibly smartass thing to do.

14 comments:

Thanks for great review and pictures. I've seen LADY IN THE LAKE quite a few times as I am a big fan of Audrey Totter. And good for Robert Montgomery to try this camera technique. It didn't always work, but when it did, it was very different . It must have been strange for the actors who never normally look at the camera!Good supporting cast too.

I liked this movie and did find it creative, but I have to admit I did feel a little irritated just waiting to see what gimmick would be used next to show Montgomery. He had a lot of guts to to do something so unusual. I don't understand why people disliked it so much, though. It's good!

I really like the Christmas ties in these movies. Good idea and good job! Merry Christmas!

Jacqueline, when I first saw LADY IN THE LAKE a few years ago, I thought it was hilarious for all the wrong reasons at first, but over time it grew on me, and since then, it's become beloved loopy favorite here at Team Bartilucci HQ! But I must say your take on LADY IN THE LAKE, has so much more going on, with so much more to think about, like one of my favorite scenes, Marlowe crawling painfully after the car wreck that almost does him in. BRAVA to you on your post, with all the food for thought in this unique version of Raymond Chandler's tale of murder and unique camerawork!

P.S.: If you're interested, just for the fun of it, here's a link to my considerably goofier view of LADY....! Enjoy, my friend, and Merry Christmas to you and yours from all of us here at Team Bartilucci HQ! :-)

Thank you very much, Dorian, and thanks for your link to your post on this movie. I remember enjoying it, and will enjoy reading it again. It's such an offbeat movie that it's always sure to generate a wide variety of opinions. Goofy is good.

Bob the Bear - a picture book by my twin brother & Me

Read Arte Acher's Falling Circus

Recent Comments on Past Posts:

It Happened to Jane is special to my family. My mother was selected to play the wife of Aaron Caldwell, the Chester town selectman in the movie and has a speaking part about the parking meter revenues gathered from outside his general store in the town center. My older brother was one of the cub scouts delivering coal donated by town residents to fuel Old 97. We grew up in Deep River. A few years ago a niece provided every member of music family copies of It Happened to Jane on DVD. The Connecticut River valley was truly an idyllic spot for growing up in the mid-Twentieth Century!

Thank you, the Lux Theatre broadcast was absolutely marvelous, and far superior, as you have indicated, the film. I have always admired Dorothy McGuire, and she has it all over Jean Peters. This is not as clear cut a differential between Joseph Cotton and Dan Dailey, but at this point in their grand careers, I will take Dan. Again thank you.

I jus watched this and I have to agree... the ending let me down. She left Howard Keel!!!! I've had a crush on him since seeing Seven Brides when I was 10.I did love the message that Rose Marie can be herself.But I'm still sad. Seriously, Rose Marie, you chose the wrong man.

My wife and I go back two decades for our love of “Remember the Night” and its heartwarming story...P.S. As I type these words I am reminded of the inscription my wife had engraved inside the wedding ring I now wear… “Remember The Night.”

Beautiful piece, Jacqueline, about yet another movie from the Unjustly Forgotten file. I agree a video release is decades overdue, (What is wrong with Universal Home Video? You'd think the only movies they ever made were monsters and Abbott & Costello. And don't even get me started on the pre-'48 Paramounts they're sitting on.) I count myself lucky to have scored a decent 16mm print on eBay some years back; otherwise it would have been a good 40 years since I saw it.

I happened upon this piece and wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed reading it. Really a great appreciation of a wonderful movie. Raoul Walsh is one of my favorite directors and this is the first of his movies I ever remember seeing--it was on the big screen back in 1952 so I guess that dates me but a movie like this was ideal for my age, both for the adventure and romance.

I guess I'm going to be busy reading all your blogs that touch on events I'm familiar with.

Judgement At Nuremberg caught my attention as I had the privilege of working in it for some 60 days. But more so as the German WWII history always recall my own trials during the war.

I suppose we filmed this around 1959-1960 which is not that long after the ending of the war. Reconstruction in Europe was far from accomplished. For the audience in 1961 this history was still a part of everyone's life.

I was overwhelmed sitting in that set and listening to the greatest actors of that generation orate day after day... an endless live theater.